<<TRANSMATHOME

2.1 Bodies, Faciality and the Clinical Regime of Signs

2.1.1

This chapter is to be a very different world from the last one. The question of the abstract machine of faciality concerns the expressiveness of the body (and the constrictions to which it is vulnerable) in a way which in part involves areas which are customarily designated as ‘clinical’ or ‘psycho-pathological’. The chapter will in fact start out by providing a basis in certain areas of psychological work - work done in relation to specific extraordinary modalities which can appear in the domain of  the becomings and connections of human bodies. This strand, however, will come to be  joined by an analysis, firstly,  of the ‘clinical’ regime of signs, with its determinations along the lines of subject-sufferers of conditions, and secondly of the component assemblage of clinics, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals that is the correlate of this regime. In turn, these strands will lead to wider issues, and to an account of the ‘body as nexus of thought’ in relation to a deepened understanding of regimes of signs.

It can be said that one issue  at stake at the deepest level in this chapter is the question  of schizophrenia. That is, schizophrenia in the sense in which it is used in the sub-title and shared heading given  to A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus (‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’).  Clearly the thesis is here beginning to mine a crucial vein: the idea of schizophrenia at stake is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. A lot of things will be a great deal clearer if this idea can be put into effect to some extent (it is only possible to start doing this now,  in that the work done in the preceding chapter is needed for the process).

However, it could be asked, ‘why start with areas that are bound up with pathology?’ The first answer to this question is that schizophrenia here is an idea which only partly connects to the often grimly turbulent and catatonic states picked out by the conventional clinical uses of the term: it also irreducibly connects to the idea of a body as a nexus of modalities  of thought (these modalities can also be referred to as ‘desiring machines’, the term used in Anti-Oedipus). This point will be explained in detail in the course of the chapter, although it can readily be seen how the idea of the thinking body as multiplicity of affects is in some ways in the same ‘space’  as is the problem of schizophrenia. A second reason for this point of departure is the fact that the anomalous conditions which will be addressed in the chapter can properly be regarded as ‘points of rupture’, where different layers or zones of stratificatory functioning are particularly apparent. It is important to make this point: that is, to recall at the outset that it is the constrictive modes of ‘everyday life’ that are in question, and  not just their acute manifestations. The final reason has already been given: this is the fact that this line of thought can also include an account of the clinical regime of signs, and of the assemblage alongside which it functions.

2.1.2

A crucial initial way of drawing the idea of schizophrenia into effect is through an analysis of the component assemblage of capitalist societies which treats,  incarcerates, and studies schizophrenics. This is the assemblage through which schizophrenics are ‘seen’, and it is the assemblage which simultaneously ‘processes’ them. The dominant concept of schizophrenia comes from this body of institutions, and simultaneously the treatment of schizophrenics in difficulties is almost entirely its work. Therefore the delineating of aspects of the overall functioning of this assemblage is an obvious starting point for breaking open a wider idea of schizophrenia. It has been remarked already  that the approach being adopted is close to that of Foucault in many of his works, in that the question of systems of signs is being firmly brought together with questions of the technologies, systems and architectures of the assemblage of power involved.

The major elements of this assemblage are hospitals, clinics, the administering of drugs, and individuals who analyse and counsel patients, and prescribe treatments (the treatments can obviously include other elements of the assemblage, such as electro-shock machines). This assemblage comes to the forefront as an element within capitalist state assemblages, these assemblages being ones where the supervision and treatment of disturbingly or pathologically anomalous bodies becomes centrally an affair of the state, rather than  being only a peripheral function of the prison assemblage. At the level of stratificatory machinic processes the program of the wider  assemblage is one of preparing and regulating bodies to make them fitted for production, and in turn the  program of the clinical assemblage is one of finding places  and treatments for anomalous bodies, and, if possible, of rehabilitating them. This account exemplifies (in minimal form) what the key passage in ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ describes as the process of ‘outlining the program of the assemblages’, and has provided an example of a jump or transition (assemblages ‘distribute everything, and bring a circulation of movement, with alternatives, jumps or mutations’ (TP p.147)). This aspect of pragmatics is described as one which ‘shows how abstract machines are effectuated in concrete assemblages’, and before long this aspect will also be exemplified, in relation to the abstract machines of faciality and of order-words.

However, before moving on, it is necessary to provide a more detailed picture of the regime of signs which is in reciprocal presupposition with the psychiatric or psychological assemblage. This is the ‘transcendental illusion’  which is specific to the assemblage (it should be remembered that this regime does not in any way sum up the thought of those who work within the assemblage, on the contrary, it sums up the non-thought which is endemic within it). This ‘clinical regime of signs’, as has been indicated, is a zone of compositions of language along the lines of the idea of individual patients/subjects suffering a condition understood as an initial or acquired defect, as opposed to thinking in terms of affects of bodies with their different forms, and in terms of socially emplaced constrictive modalities  such as the regime of signifiance or of paranoia. For the first – stratificatory - way of thinking, everything is a question of struggling subjects, and of defects in systems, whether these are genetic defects, or aquired defects in the form of incapacities to do certain things, or to do them in a conventional or effective way. For the second way of thinking, everything is a question of becomings, and of different manifestations of these becomings (for instance, more or less integrated manifestations), where these can be deterritorialising or stratificatory becomings. Here the difference is between an engagement which makes contact with the transcendental modalities of production emplaced within social assemblages - and  functioning in differentiated ways in group and individual bodies -, and a connection with the domain only in terms of regularities, structures, and defects.  What this means is firstly that with the stratificatory mode there is no contact with the modalities of engagement and emergence from which ‘defect manifestations’ emerge. Secondly it means that there is no engagement with the constrictive modalities that are emplaced within social fields, such as the abstract machine of order-words, with its regimes of signs. Thirdly it means that relative advantages of the limitation or absence of a modality - through the non-effectuation of a mode of a stratification – cannot be understood as such, but remain a mystery that accompanies determinations in terms of defects, rather than in terms of different economies, or different nexuses of engagements (autism is an exemplary case in relation to this point).

At one level, what this regime of signs  is ‘fixated upon’ is the double world of technological machines and of social systems of organisation. The subject figured as  suffering an anomalous condition  is drawn or traced from the case of a person struggling with an initially faulty or subsequently damaged machine. However, the whole account involving defects as lacks in relation to a structure or conventional sequence is also drawn from the field of regulatory and instrumental systems that make up the plane of organisation of social assemblages (structures, laws, conventional ways of acting). The idea is of a rule continually being broken by a body working within a process, where this idea can be applied both to the field of the body pertaining to the subject,  and to the subject itself, which is posited as being capable of  suffering from partial or localised incapacities to follow rules or conventions. Everything here concerns subjects, objects and deviations; citizens, tools and defects. In this way the delusions and anomalous language compositions of schizophrenics are connected with as deviations from adherence to normal patterns. The same  applies, to take a different instance, with the often extremely complex tics of people with  Tourette’s syndrome, in that these are engaged with (which is to say, not engaged with at all) as deviations from normal processes of movement or action.

However, at a further level (the level which in a sense is most definitive) , the zone of fixation  of the regime is the clinical assemblage of power itself. This is the world of patients and doctors: that is, of patients (or objects) who are recurently chemically ‘pacified’, and are often oppressed by incarceration, and of doctors (subjects)  who restrain the patients and attempt to rectify defects. The occasional presence of practices involving different kinds and degrees of  cooperation does not in any way undermine the fact that this is the mode or model which is central to the clinical regime of signs. In extraordinary cases, such practices set off ripples of escape from the routines of the assemblage and the functioning of the regime of signs: they do not in themselves threaten  the mode, but are themselves escapes from it. In fact, the  idea of a reciprocal assistance between the two demarcated zones does not  go beyond the model, because it maintains the subject position, even if it has complicated matters in relation to the objects. Everything with this regime concerns the individual/doctor who must legislate with routines and intervene with remedies in the face of defective processes/patients. A question of internalising your own doctor-process, and slipping grimly into the  clinical ‘daylight’. What of course is missed is that the field or consistency-zone of processes is everything, and that the cartography of these ‘schizophrenic’ connections or becomings is what is necessary to block de-intensificatory forms of engagement (whether in acute or chronic states). It is on this cusp that it is realised that in the strongest sense there is a great deal of  intensive cartographic  engagement running in subtle threads through delirial states, and that for all concerned the clinical regime of signs is an obscured, chronic form of insanity, or form of human de-intensificatory functioning.

2.1.3

But what has this to do with the abstract machine of ‘faciality’? It was stated earlier that an account of this abstract machine was to be a central element of this chapter. What is the role of ‘faciality’ in this new departure in the direction of schizophrenia and the clinical regime of signs? It is now possible to give an initial explanation of the idea in question here, and this can take place in a way where the relevance of the idea for the areas that have been outlined in the preceding discussion will be immediately apparent.

The best way of coming at the problem is to set out the nature of this abstract machine in its non-stratificatory, deterritorialising form. What is being engaged by the deterritorialising  faculty-affect of ‘faciality’, and by the abstract machine that is its wider form? An initial  answer is that its field is that  of singular zones of  inter-consistently modifying elements, where these zones  can have only a single encountered instance, or can have the form of a phylum of instances. A more in-depth answer is that these zones consist of densely arrayed molecular fields of relations of speed and slowness, and of movement and rest. These terms are taken up by Deleuze and Guattari as part of a summary of Spinozistic analysis in relation to bodies or ‘substantial forms’(TP p.253), and they are  vital for understanding  the abstract machine of faciality.

Spinoza points out for instance in relation to the human  body that it ‘is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite’,[1] and he precedes this with the observation that ‘simple’ bodies are to be ‘reciprocally distinguished in terms of motion or rest, quickness or slowness’.[2] ‘Simple bodies’ here are not ‘atomic’, but instead are  simple relationally within fields, in that they are zones  which are  dynamic and pulsive (they can also be at rest) in connection with the other zones. The endless density of these zones – across and within levels – is like a corellate in the world of fluid bodies of the infinitely intricate sets explored by Cantor. Where does the field of the tics, vibrations, pulses and dynamisms of a body end? The answer is that it does not, even though processes of entering into composition with these fields can  take place, and continually does take place. A summary can be taken from one of the sections about Spinoza in ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal’:

Spinoza’s approach is radical: Arrive at elements that no longer have either form or function [no form in the sense that a zone of turbulence has no form], that are abstract in this sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely divisible. They are infinitely small [i.e. as energetic instances there is no scale of dynamism below them], ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or composition. They are not defined by their number since they always come in infinities. However. Depending on their degree of speed or the relation of motion and rest into which they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of another Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so on to infinity. There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter. (TP p.254 – interpellations in square brackets mine)

This is the idea of the field or plane of micro-corporeality. The axiom here is that a body is a micro-corporeal field, the field of relations of which can be engaged with to different degrees of intensity. 

When someone takes up a complex physical capacity through watching or listening to someone else (say, the taking up of a mode of expressiveness in playing a musical instrument) the process is one of the learning body  entering into composition with  relations of speed and slowness, and of movement and rest, pertaining to the field of the other body. It will be apparent therefore that in its non-stratificatory form the abstract machine in question here is that of engagement with particular bodily modalities (faciality being the term for the ‘captured’ or ‘strata-enveloped’ form). The abstract machine specifically concerns relations of depth of microcorporeal fields, rather than including the relations of exteriority with other zones (becomings, affects). It thus stands in contrast to engagement with fields of affects (trans-prehension).

So what is this abstract machine in its stratificatory form? It is a regulatory mode of engagement with modes of body-process, involving particular restricted and codified fields of functionings of the human body. This abstract machine concerns a domain of fields of overall expressive tonality and a domain of expressions accompanying the production of different kinds of statement. In the first case what is acquired is a field of global subjectificatory states, and in the second case what is acquired is a field of expressions that are ‘keyed in’ to the production of kinds of statement. What is beyond this are freed lines of engagement with zones of consistency: becomings with non-subjectified human modes; animal becomings; molecular becomings; music becomings. A Thousand Plateaus playfully refers to these becomings as ‘probe-heads’. It is these lines of connection that are blocked off by the world of subjectified global modes and expressions locked in as part of the process of producing regulatory compositions of language. Deleuze and Guattari sum up all of these ideas in the following way: 

...the abstract machine has two very different states: sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about deterritorialisations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that are absolute but remain negative [two different modes of regulated transformation]; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency giving it a ‘diagrammatic’ function, a positive value of deterritorialisation, the ability to form new abstract machines. Sometimes the abstract machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of arborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable ‘defacialisation’, it frees something like probe-heads  that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes in subjectivity, fell trees in favour of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight (TP p.190).

The abstract machine of faciality is a constrictive modality in relation to processes of entering into composition with zones of consistency  (intensive bodies in their  ‘depth’ aspect) which both selects for certain kinds of bodily and facial action and discriminates in relation to encountered human bodies on the basis of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ expressions. However beyond this there is the abstract machine of zones of consistency. The manifestations of this abstract machine take the form of extraordinary kinds of ‘knowledge’: knowledge of densely complex fields of movement (these can in some cases find expression in language, but the task involved in achieving this is very difficult). It is a question of entering into composition with zones of consistency, and it is very much a question of being beyond subjectivity. Blatant or ‘irruptive’ manifestations of this abstract machine will be met with responses that collectively provide a list of crimes against subjectivity: ‘they looked inhuman’; ‘they looked like an animal’; ‘they looked  like someone else’; ‘they looked crazy’... This is not about delinquency or imitation, but is about knowledge, and the generation of knowledge, which is to say that it is about becomings, and about passages over thresholds to new fields of easily available modes of action. The idea is of these becomings being ‘probe-heads’ stretched out into zones of consistency. Also, a major part of what is at stake is the discovery that subjective feelings are learned modes of functioning of the body (the results of  enterings into composition with facialised, subjectified  bodies) which overall are de-intensificatory, and which can be left behind or unlearned. A feeling of this kind (whether something like elation or pride, or something like melancholy or self-pity) is a learned mode of inter-consistent functioning of the field of the body, which in one way or another integrally involves an overall de-intensification, despite a core of generativity  (with elation this is a spasmodic returning to certain intense points, and a shutting down of surrounding becomings, but it is also the subsequent collapse involved with this feeling).  Beyond these passions of the abstract machine of faciality are the joys or intensifications of becomings, of freed processes of entering into composition with zones of consistency. All of the immense  intelligence of non-subjective processes of  becoming with animals, with humans, with plants, with music, with painting, with non-organic bodies... The movements of the face here become the ripples that are part of new, free motions of the depths, rather than improvisations on the basis of a field of appropriate subjectificatory surface expressions.  When Nietzsche writes about a return to psychology it is ideas such as these that are one crucial aspect of what is at stake.[3] A question of the ‘biting off’ of the snake’s head of subjectified modes of functioning, in the emergence of free de-territorialised, trans-human  modes.[4] The issue of the passions of the abstract machine of faciality is one major element of a psychography (a psychography alongside a cosmography, a sociography, a territography...).

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